The Fight Norman Mailer Quotes

Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.

It is not uncommon for fighters’ camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one’s life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing.

Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.

How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.

No, just as Marlon Brando seemed to inhabit a role as though it were a natural extension of his mood, so Ali treated boxing.

For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to be bold enough to live with all the magical forces at loose between the living and the dead. That is never free of dread. It takes bravery to live with beauty or wealth if we think of them as an existence connected to the messages, the curses, and the loyalties of the dead. In

(On choosing to write the book in third person, and using his name Norman as the nom de plume) NOW, OUR MAN of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good deal of love. He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him. They were becoming like everyone else’s. His mind, he noticed, was beginning to spin its wheels, sometimes seeming to repeat itself for the sheer slavishness of supporting mediocre habits. If he was now wondering what name he ought to use for his piece about the fight, it was out of no excess of literary ego. More, indeed, from concern for the reader’s attention. It would hardly be congenial to follow a long piece of prose if the narrator appeared only as an abstraction: The Writer, The Traveler, The Interviewer. That is unhappy in much the way one would not wish to live with a woman for years and think of her as The Wife. Nonetheless, Norman was certainly feeling modest on his return to New York and thought he might as well use his first name — everybody in the fight game did. Indeed, his head was so determinedly empty that the alternative was to do a piece without a name. Never had his wisdom appeared more invisible to him and that is a fair condition for acquiring an anonymous voice.

Margaret is kindled by it, exalted for a time, sees it as passion, glows and becomes rounded, but only for a time. After a year it is completely naked, apparent to her, that he is alone, that he fights out battles with himself upon her body, and something withers in her.

Maybe all illness results from a failure of communication between mind and body. It is certainly true of such quick disease as a knockout.